He came up off the river path at the bottom of the street and stood behind a parked delivery van, and waited.
The light came up slowly, grey then pink. The street was empty. The roll-up doors were down. The shelf on the wall was where it had been on Thursday, the photograph and the rosary and the jar of marigolds, and the candle in its tall glass, burned down to a stub and gone out.
At ten past six a figure came down the far end of the street on a bicycle. Black hooded sweatshirt, hood up this time. He leaned the bike against the wall, took a new candle from the pocket of the sweatshirt, knelt, and changed the old one for the new. He lit it with a plastic lighter, cupping it, and stayed there on one knee with his head down for a while.
Then he stood up, and pulled the hood back, and Thorsen saw the side of his face and his jaw, and the way his right hand went to the small of his back and stayed there.
Thorsen walked out from behind the van.
Mateo turned fast. He was quick, and he had obviously practised it in a mirror, and the pistol came out of his waistband and up in both hands, a small black automatic, pointing at the middle of Thorsen’s chest from twelve feet away.
“Stop. Stop right there.”
Thorsen stopped. He kept his hands where they were, open, at his sides.
“You know what they’re saying about you?” The boy’s voice was high and tight. “It’s on everything. You killed the old man. And some security guy last night. In the park.”
“I know what they’re saying.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“How do I know?”
“You don’t.” Thorsen took one step. The muzzle followed him. “You’ve got the safety on.”
Mateo’s eyes flicked down to the gun.
It was the oldest trick there is and it should not work on anybody over the age of twelve, and it worked, because people who have never fired a gun at a man in their lives always look. Thorsen covered the last of the distance in the time it took him to look. He took the slide in his left hand and the boy’s wrist in his right and turned both, against each other, the way the old range sergeant at the academy had shown him a long time ago, and the pistol came out of Mateo’s hand into his own as though Mateo had passed it to him.
The boy stood there with his empty hands up and his mouth open.
“It didn’t have a safety,” he said.
“No.”
Thorsen turned it over. A cheap nine millimetre, the kind that changed hands for two hundred dollars in the car parks of Pacoima. Serial number ground off. Seven in the magazine, one in the chamber. He dropped the magazine into his palm, racked the slide and caught the round out of the air, pushed out the pin with his thumbnail and slid the barrel assembly off the frame. It took him about eight seconds. He had done it, or something like it, every week on the range for nineteen years.
Then he walked the twenty yards to the river fence and threw the pieces, one at a time, as far out as he could into the brown water of the channel. The slide. The barrel. The spring. The frame. The magazine. The loose rounds in a little scatter, like a man feeding ducks.
When he turned round Mateo was crying. Not loudly. Angrily, with his fists clenched, the tears running down and him not wiping them.
“I put that plate in one of those websites,” he said. “The silver truck. It’s some security company. Castle-something. They’ve got an office in Glendale, a big glass building on Brand, it’s on their website. I was going to go there and wait in their car park for the bald one.”
“I’ve been in that building,” Thorsen said. “I’ve met him.”
“He killed the old man. Didn’t he? He killed Mr. Okafor.”
“I think he was there.”
“And he killed my sister.”
Thorsen did not answer that. He did not know it yet. He looked at the boy, at seventeen years of rage with nowhere to go, standing next to the candle he lit every Sunday so that his mother would not have to.
“If you’d done it,” he said, “you’d be dead by now. He’d have seen you coming from the top floor. He’d have watched you sit in his car park for an hour and then he’d have sent somebody down. And then your mother would have two candles to light. And all the things he did would still be done, and nobody would ever know about them. That’s what a gun gets you. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”
Mateo wiped his face, finally, with the heel of his hand.
“So what do you get?”
“Proof.” Thorsen pushed up his left sleeve and held the forearm out, the numbers in fading ballpoint above the two burns. “I need you to tell me if I’m right about something.”
Mateo looked at it for about a second. Then he laughed. It came out of him cracked and ugly and wet.
“That’s three-one-one. That’s her.” He shook his head. “SR. Service request. That’s what the city gives you. Mari had hundreds of those. She used to read them out at dinner. SR one-two-eight-something, streetlight, closed. My mom would be like, eat your rice.” He swallowed. “Where’d you get that?”
“Ray Okafor hid it. Behind a pegboard in his garage. Where only I’d look.”
“Why?”
“I think it was her last one.”
The boy went very quiet.
“What was she angry about,” Thorsen said, “that last week? Your mother said she stopped telling her. Did she tell you?”
Mateo looked across the river. On the far bank, past the cycle path and a strip of scrub, a long chain-link fence ran beside the water with green screening fabric on it, and beyond that a big flat empty piece of ground with a few old concrete footings and heaps of something pale, and the rusted stub of a railway siding with a small brick signal box at the end of it, its windows long gone.
“The yard,” he said. “Over there. The old rail yard, by the bridge. Nobody used it for years. But at night trucks came and dumped stuff. All night sometimes. She used to walk home along the river path from the kitchen and she’d see them, lights off, backing up to the edge. Drums and dirt and I don’t know what.” He sniffed. “It made her so mad. She said they were poisoning the river. She filmed them on her phone, standing right there on the path in the dark. I told her she was crazy. She sent it all to the city, like twenty times. They never did anything.”
“Was there one time that was different?”
Mateo frowned. Six years. He had been eleven.
“There was one night she came home weird. Like, not mad. Scared, I guess. She said she filmed something and she didn’t know what it was. She said it wasn’t dumping trucks, it was a van, and guys, and they were digging.” He shook his head slowly. “She showed my mom and my mom said it was too dark, you couldn’t see anything, go to bed. And Mari said she was going to take it to the police. Real police, not the city.”
“Did she?”
“Yeah. Next day. After school. Northeast station.” He said the name of it with his mouth twisted. “She came home and she said they took her name and her number and the guy at the desk was really nice. And she was happy. She said, see, somebody’s going to come.”
Thorsen did not say anything at all.
“Two days after that,” Mateo said, “she was dead.”
The candle burned on the shelf behind him. The sun was over the hills now and it lit the whole length of the street, and the far bank, and the green fence along the empty yard.
Thorsen looked at the yard for a long time.
Pale heaps. Fine as flour. A chemical smell like a swimming pool a long way off.
Ray’s boots, crusted to the ankle. The inside of a silver Tahoe’s wheel arch.
“Mateo,” he said. “Have you got a phone?”